This was the moment. The really important one. The system could feel the majicka in both of them churning, and there was no part of that turbulence that she could claim she caused. They were both knots now. The bad kind.


    She could have helped them avoid this, maybe by gently nudging them away. But she hadn’t. It was a hard thing, but deep down the system could feel it was necessary, even if she couldn’t explain exactly why. Mizu would always be tied to Arthur, even if just by a single, weak thread. If his knots dragged him down, hers would always be dragged down a little too.


    If he went the wrong way, so would she.


    The system knew a trick with knots, something demons had done during the war to escape captivity and that they now did as a trick in magic shows. When someone was tied by knots, sometimes they would tense up within them. This made the knots tighter, but it also made room in them once the captive relaxed. It was sometimes enough for them to squeeze their way out.


    Sometimes. If they were quick enough. If they weren’t, they ended up tied that much more.


    —


    “It’s not fair to you.” Arthur’s voice was breaking too. “You worked too hard on that town. I’ve seen your wells. I don’t understand them, really, but I know enough to know how hard you worked on them. And that’s just part of it. You built up that town with everyone else. It’s your place.”


    Mizu put her hand to her chest and took a deep breath, steadying herself.


    “It’s our place, Arthur. Ours,” Mizu said.


    “Yes. But I have to leave. And I’ll come here.”


    “Here isn’t that bad, Arthur!” Mizu said. “The capital has a lot of the best wells in the world, it’s known as the best city in the world.”


    “Yeah. I mean, for now. But then I’ll have to leave again, and again. Because of Arthur Stuff.”


    Mizu didn’t roll her eyes. She might have, if it was a really dumb thing to say. If there was nothing to base it on. But she didn’t. There wasn’t much direct evidence of Arthur Stuff being real. It could have all been a big coincidence, something that was just one roll of the dice after another. But in the few years they had been here, too much had happened for anyone who knew Arthur to believe that it was just luck.


    He had been thinking about it a lot, the last few days. It wasn’t just him. Lily had a class where she shouldn’t at all. Milo had a rare class. Mizu had leveled and grown in a way that complemented her brightness perfectly. Karra was a supervisor class now, something she would have never picked for herself but was already growing into in amazing ways.


    Even the adults weren’t immune, if Arthur had made his guess right. It wasn’t an all-the-time thing, but people like Ella and Eito used to talk about their own bottlenecks around him, and how they were probably stuck for the rest of their lives. And then, at some point, they just stopped.


    The city had done well, while he was there. He had made a dent in how it operated, though the idea he had a significant impact was pure nonsense. He had brought every other city closer together with a simple memory of some unimportant-seeming technology. He had built what seemed to very honestly be the very best town in the entire frontier, the one people looked to for support and examples of how to do things right. And now the capital had found him and come calling.


    The list went on. Rhodia was better than she should be, in some subtle ways. Corbin was the very best sneaky guy in the world, somehow, and while Arthur thought at least that one had more to do with Corbin himself, it still wasn’t exactly normal.


    Arthur was trapped in a current so strong and so fast that even the people who were helping him from the shore were getting dragged alone. Mizu might not have thought about it as much as he had, but she had to know. A force like that wouldn’t just stop. It couldn’t. The only chance she had of staying still was to get out of the river entirely, and let Arthur wash down to the sea alone.


    He dumped all of those thoughts out as fast as his mouth would let him form words. He wasn’t making much sense. He knew that. It was too much emotion and not enough fact for that. Arthur tried to make up for that in volume. He was drowning, and he was going to tell Mizu before she drowned too.


    —


    There it was. The clench. The System could feel everything inside of Arthur bunch up and just stop, like too many people trying to use a grocery store aisle at once.


    She had never told him how his Rise Together! skill worked once he had chosen to forget it. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t get a sense of it eventually, some idea that he was tethered to the people around him in a way that affected them and their direction.


    Of course, the boy had gotten every other detail almost exactly wrong. Knots worked both ways. Sometimes people used them to hold other people captive, and in those cases, the prisoners longed for them to be untied. But knots were also what people made to hold things that belonged together. People sometimes tied themselves to things to make sure they stayed close. That they stayed safe. That they didn’t lose them.This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.


    The System understood why Arthur had made the mistake of thinking about it as an involuntary effect, one that just happened to anyone who happened to be around him long enough. It would have been a happy thing if he knew the truth. If she could have told him. If she could just reach down and cover him with her hand and let him feel the warmth of what she knew about how others thought about him.


    But she couldn’t.


    If she had lungs and a mouth in a way people would have understood, she would have sighed with relief when she saw the knots in Mizu’s heart suddenly untangle all at once. She had figured it out. She could see just enough truth from where she was standing to determine what to say, if she really wanted to.


    And she did. Mizu had always been a smart girl.


    —


    “It’s not a river,” Mizu whispered.


    Arthur almost didn’t hear the words. They were so quiet.


    “What?”


    “It’s not a river, Arthur. You aren’t dragging people downstream with you.” Mizu took Arthur’s hands. “I figured it out. A bit. It’s all the same problem. You think people do things because they have to.”


    “Don’t they?” Arthur said. “I mean, I know there are limits. But everyone talks about duty so much.”


    “No. At least I think they don’t, not in the way you hear it. Duty, Arthur, is about doing what’s right. And sometimes something is right so often that it sort of becomes a rule. Nobody thinks of it like you are thinking about it.” Mizu gripped his hands a little tighter. “I think it’s because you haven’t been around the System that long. It would have been different if you had grown up here, because of all the stories.”


    “The stories?”


    “Children’s stories about people going the wrong direction for bad reasons. There’s a ton of them because they all teach one very important lesson. In the System’s world, people need to choose their own direction. They don’t do things because they have to.”


    “Even if it means a bunch of sick people don’t get help?”


    “Even then. Because eventually, you’re going to be something different. You are going to change. And when people do things they really don’t want to do, they end up being less than they could have been. All that stuff about the best things your tea could do, where it makes the most difference, that’s just stuff on paper.”


    “They talked about it like it was really important.”


    “It probably was. This is more important, Arthur. It’s about who we are.” Mizu suddenly dropped towards the ground, pulling Arthur with her, laughing she settled on the ground. “Nobody does anything they don’t want to do forever, Arthur. It wouldn’t be nice.”


    —


    And there it was. Duty was an important thing for the demons, to be sure. But it was also something they had understood after an unlikely rescue from centuries of war. They had the advantage of seeing a newly woven peace when the memories of widespread devastation were still fresh. They had seen their cities rebuilt. They had pushed back against beast tides together. They had attained new skills that made lives better instead of cutting them short.


    And though that, they had understood as one that it was better that way. That when everyone worked in their own way to make the world better, they could build towards a perfect place.


    Then, of course, they had immediately overshot. Things were better, but people would convince themselves that they would be better off with a reluctant, lackluster seamstress than a brilliant artist. There was always more to do and more to improve.


    It took them a century to really learn that lesson. There were always little optimizations to chase, and there would always be emergencies that upset the balance of things. But when people did what they were meant to do, they had a chance at greatness. And a society built on greatness just did better.


    Every demon was born with those lessons steeped into their bones. Arthur hadn’t had that advantage. But where he understood duty as debt, the system had accepted it as a temporary thing, something that would eventually be unwound. Now that Mizu had her hands on the end of the string, the System knew it wouldn’t be long.


    —


    “Arthur, I wouldn’t go anywhere with you if it would make me unhappy. When I said I’d follow you to a desert, I meant something different.”


    “Which is?”


    “That you, Earthling,” Mizu said, “Are my water.”


    —


    Yes, thought the system. Keep going.


    —


    “And nobody, Arthur, who has ever met you has been swept away in your current. You think that’s what’s happening because everyone who you meet ends up changing, like they were getting dragged along.” Mizu leaned in. “I’m going to tell you the secret about that now. Are you ready?”


    “I’m ready.”


    Mizu put her mouth next to Arthur’s ear and whispered so low he had to concentrate to hear her.


    “You think you owe this world something. You always have. Every one of your friends has told you that you don’t. The reason everyone seems to be dragged along with you is that everyone loves you, Arthur. They always have.”


    “But...”


    “Nope. If Lily wants to come with you to the city, it’s because she wants to. I can speak for her here. And if I come, and I will if it comes down to that, it’s because I want to. We’d all still be your friends, Arthur. But you don’t have to protect us. We are with you because we want to be.”


    “Well, yeah, I mean…”


    “You don’t mean anything.” Mizu settled back into the ground. “I want you to look back at your entire life here, Arthur, and figure this out, once and for all.” Mizu gestured out at the general nothing-going-on around them. “We have all night. Tell me when you get there.”


    Arthur thought about it. Why did he always get back to feeling unsure about his place in the world? Mizu wasn’t wrong. He always did. He was a Teamaster who spent less time making tea than he wanted to because every job that needed to be done felt like his job. He had a group of friends and family that he didn’t feel like he deserved. Eventually, he always got back to feeling like he was in the wrong place, even though he couldn’t imagine a better place to be.


    “I don’t feel like I deserve it,” Arthur said.


    “Oh, none of us do. But that’s because none of us built it by ourselves, Arthur. We each have our little piece we do our best on, and we all get more than we put in. That’s it. That’s all you ever needed to do, was your little piece of things, plus just helping out folks when you were in a position to because things are nicer that way. That’s all you ever owed. You get that, right?”


    And right until that moment, Arthur really hadn’t. If she had told him the same thing a year ago, he would have nodded, and it would have made things feel better for a bit. But somehow, this time felt different.


    Just my little piece, huh? Arthur thought. That is really nice when you think about it.